...In at least one sequence Kubrick uses [the steadicam] spectacularly: we
glide behind Danny (Danny Lloyd), the boy in peril (he looks about
five), who is at the center of the film, as he pedals his low-rider
tricycle up and down the corridors of the huge Overlook hotel, where
most of the action takes place. Some of us in the audience may want to
laugh with pleasure at the visual feat, and it is joined to an aural
one: the sounds of the wheels moving from rug to wood are uncannily
exact. We almost want to applaud. Yet though we may admire the effects,
we're never drawn in by them, mesmerized. When we see a flash of bloody
cadavers or observe a torrent of blood pouring from an elevator, we're
not frightened, because Kubrick's absorption in film technology
distances us.

It took nerve, or maybe something like hubris, for Kubrick to go against
all convention and shoot most of the gothic in broad daylight. Probably
he liked the idea of our waking into a nightmare instead of falling
asleep into one. And, having used so many night shots in A Clockwork
Orange and so much romantic lighting in Barry Lyndon, he may have
wanted the technical challenge of the most glaring kind of brightness.
. . . There isn't a dark corner anywhere; even the kitchen storerooms
have a flourescent boldness. But the conventions of gothics are fun. Who
wants to see evil in daylight, through a wide-angle lens? We go to The
Shining hoping for nasty scare effects and for an appeal to our giddiest
nighttime fears -- vaporous figures, shadowy places. What we get doesn't
tease the imagination. Visually, the movie often feels like a cheat,
because most of the horror images are not integrated into the travelling
shots; the horrors involved in the hotel's bloody past usually appear in
inserts that flash on like the pictures in a slide show. In addition,
there are long, static dialogues between Torrence and two demonic
characters -- a bartender and a waiter -- who are clearly -his- deamons:
they are personified temptations, as in a medieval mystery play, and
they encourage him in his worst impulses. (They also look as substantial
as he does.) The taciturn bartender is lighted to look satanic; he
offers Torrence free drinks. The loathsome, snobbish English waiter
goads Torrence to maintain his authority over his wife and child by
force. During these lengthy conversations, we seem to be in a hotel in
Hell. It's a very talky movie (a Hell for movie-lovers). Clearly,
Stanley Kubrick isn't primarily interested in the horror film as scary
fun or for the mysterious beauty that directors such as Dreyer and
Marnau have brought to it. Kubrick is a virtuoso technician, and that is
part of the excitement that is generated by a new Kubrick film. But he
isn't just a virtuoso technician; he's also, God help us, a deadly
serious metaphysician.. . .

Do the tensions between father, mother, and son create the ghosts, or do
the ghosts serve as catalysts to make those tensions erupt? It appears
to be an intertwined process. Kubrick seems to be saying that rage,
uncontrollable violence, and ghosts spawn each other -- that they are
really the same thing. He's using Stephen King's hokum to make a
metaphysical statement about immortality. The Torrences are his
archetypes; they are the sources and victims of monsters that live on.

Kubrick mystifies us deliberately, much as Antonioni did in The
Passenger, though for different purposes. The conversations between
Jack and his demons are paced like the exposition in drawing-room
melodramas of fifty years ago; you could drop stones into a river and
watch the ripples between words. (In one of those scenes, with Jack and
the waiter conversing in a men's room, the movie comes to a dead halt,
from which it never fully recovers.) Kubrick wants to disorient us. At a
critical moment in the action, there's an abrupt cut to the images on
the TV news that Halloran, the cook, is watching in Florida, and the
audience is bewildered -- it's as if the projectionist made a mistake.
In one scene, Jack, in bed, wears a sweatshirt; the lettering across it
is reversed, so we assume we're seeing a mirror image. But then Wendy
enters the room and goes over to him, and we never move away to see the
mirror. [Kael is in error in her description of this cut. The mirror is
quite noticable as framing during the beginning of the shot, but
disappears out-of-frame during a slow dolly-in.] The Shining is also
full of deliberate time dislocations. Two little sisters (who seem the
deliberate recreation of a Diane Arbus photograph [!]) appear before
Danny; we naturally assume that they are the butchered daughters of the
earlier caretaker. But they are wearing twin party dresses of the
twenties, and we have been told that the daughters where killed in the
winter of 1970. Jack says that he injured Danny three years ago, and
Wendy says that it happened five months ago. The waiter, whom Jack first
meets at a twenties party, has the same name as the murderous caretaker
of 1970. (There is no mention of who has taken care of the hotel in the
winters since then.) The film is punctuated with titles: suddenly there
will be a black frame with "Tuesday" on it, or "3 o'clock," or
"Saturday;" after the first ones, the titles all refer to time, but in
an almost arbitrary way [In fact, the titlecards are distinctly ordered in
such a way as to indicate an increasing compression of time -- Ed.]. Jack says that he loves the hotel and wishes
"we could stay here forever, and ever, and ever." And at the very end
there's a heavy hint of reincarnation and the suggestion that Jack -has-
been there forever, ever, ever. I hate to say it, but I think the
central character of this movie is time itself, or, rather,
timelessness. . . .

The clumsiest part of the movie involves a promise that is clearly
broken. When Jack is becoming dangerous, Danny tries to get help in the
only way he can, by sending psychic messages to Halloran. The film then
crosscuts between the mother and child in their ordeal and Halloran in
his apartment in Florida, Halloran trying to make contact with the hotel
by phone, Halloran trying to have the Forest service make contact with
the hotel by radio, Halloran flying to Denver, Halloran in the air,
landing at the Denver airport, renting a car and driving to Boulder,
tricking a friend in order to borrow a sno-cat, in the sno-cat driving
(always seen in profile, looking like a sculptured Indian), approaching,
finally arriving. He walks toward the entrance (with his dear, bowlegged
gait), comes in the door, walks inside (still bowlegged), and calls out
and calls out -- the scene is prolonged. And nothing decisive to the
movie comes of all this. Halloran travelled all that way and we were
subjected to all that laborious crosscutting (which destroyed any chance
for a buildup of suspense back at the hotel) just to provide a
sacrificial victim and a sno-cat? The awful suspicion pops into mind
that since we don't want to see Wendy or Danny hurt and there's nobody
else alive around for Jack to get at, he's given the black man.
(Remember the scene in "Huckleburry Finn" when Huck tells Tom's Aunt
Sally that he arrived on a steamboat and that a cylinder head had
"blowed out." "Good gracious!" she says. "Anybody hurt?" "No'm. Killed a
nigger." "Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.") But,
at the same time, Halloran is the only noble character in the movie. Too
noble. Something doesn't sit right about the way the movie ascribes the
gift of shining to the good black man and the innocent child (the
insulted and the injured?), and having Halloran's Florida apartment
decorated with big pictures of proud sexy black women gives the film an
odor of sanctity. The waiter referred to Halloran as a "nigger cook;"
the demons in this monvie are so vicious they're even racists.

The Shining seems to be about the quest for immortality -- the
immortality of evil. Men are psychic murderers: they want to be free and
creative, and can only take out their frustrations on their terrified
wives and children. The movie appears to be a substitution story: The
waiter denies that he was the caretaker, but there has always been a
caretaker. And if the waiter is telling the truth, it's Jack who has
always been the caretaker. Or maybe Jack is so mad that he has hatched
this waiter, in which case Jack probably has always been the
caretaker. Apparently, he lives forever, only to attack his family
endlessly. It's what Kubrick said in 2001: Mankind began with the weapon
and just went on from there. Redrum ("murder" backward). Kubrick is the
man who thought it necessary to introduce a godlike force (the black
slab) to account for evolution. It was the slab that told the apelike
man to pick up the bone and use it as a weapon. This was a new version
of original sin: man the killer acts on God's command. Somehow, Kubrick
ducked out on the implications of his own foolishness when he gave 2001
its utopian, technological ending -- man, reborn out of science, as
angelic, interplanetary fetus. Now he seems to have gone back to his
view at the beginning of 2001: man is a murderer, throughout eternity.
The bone that was high in the air has turned into Jack's axe, held
aloft, and Jack, crouched over, making wild, inarticulate sounds as he
staggers in the maze, has become the ape.